The greatest name in man’s victorious fight against diseases, Louis
Pasteur, was born on December 27, 1822 in the French town of Dole.
He was the only son of Jean-Joseph Pasteur, a poor tanner. Before Louis
was three years old, the family moved to the town of Arbois. As a child, his
interest lay in painting and he wanted to be an artist; but inspired by his
parents, he became devoted to his studies in school and college and
graduated from the Royal College in Besancon. Then, in 1843, his success
in an entrance exmination enabled him to join the famous Ecole Normal
Superieure in Paris. After four years he passed from there with distinction in
physics and chemistry.
He developed keen interest in chemical research and diligently pursued it.
When he was only 26, he made an exciting discovery: about crystal structure. He
found two different— asymmetric – forms of tartaric crystals — mirror images of
each other; he could separate them and show that both rotated polarized light in equal but opposite
directions. Pasteur thus became the father of a new science, stereochemistry.
In 1854, he was made Professor of Chemistry in the new University of Lille. It was here that he
did his first major work on fermentation, which became the origin of microbiology. Lille, a centre of
wine- and beer-making, was facing the problem of the liquids getting sour and putrified during
fermentation. Pasteur showed that it was microbes that caused them to be spoilt, and by moderately
heating them for a few minutes, the microbes would be eliminated. By pasteurisation (now used all
over the world in the case of milk), Pasteur saved the industry from collapse.
The silk industry in France was being crippled by a similar crisis, when millions of silk worms
perished by an unknown disease. Pasteur found that the worms had two killer diseases, both
caused by microbes.His immunization method to eliminate them helped the industry to survive utter
ruin. He now turned his attention to medicine. Exhorted by him, surgeons started disinfecting their
instruments by boiling and steaming before performing an operation.
His great discovery, which saved millions of human lives and won for him world-wide gratitude,
was his cure for rabies caused by a mad dog’s bite. Despite grave danger, he sucked a mad dog’s
saliva into a tube and made a vaccine of weakened rabies’ germs out of it. He now faced a
dilemma : how to try it on humans. It was then that a boy named Joseph Meister, bitten by a dog in
14 places, was brought to him(see box on facing page). Pasteur Institutes, on the model of the
Institute in Paris established as per his wish, have been set up in many countries, including one at
Coonoor in India. Pasteur died (at the height of his glory) on September 28, 1895 at Saint-Cloud near
Paris. Craters on Mars and the moon have been named after him.
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